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• Unexplained cache RAM drops on Linux machine

  - by FunkyChicken

  I run a CentOS 5.7 64 machine with 24gb ram and running kernel 2.6.18-274.12.1.el5. This machine runs only Nginx, php-fpm and Xcache as extra applications. Since about 3 weeks my memory behavior on this machine has changed and I cannot explain why. There are no crons running which flush anything like this. There are also no large numbers of files being deleted/changed during these drops. The 'cached' memory gets dropped about every few hours, but it's never a set gap between flushes, this indicates to me that some bottleneck gets reached instead. It also always seems to be when total memory usages gets to about 18GB, but again, not always exactly 18GB. This is a graph of my memory usage: As you can see in the graph the 'buffers' always stay more or less the same, it is mainly the 'cache' that gets dropped. Running vmstat -m I have outputted the memory usage just before and just after a memory drop. The output is here: http://pastebin.com/diff.php?i=hJqZqztm 'old version' being before, 'new version' being after a drop. About 3 weeks ago my server crashed during a heavy DDOS attack, after I rebooted the machine this odd behavior started. I have checked a bunch of logs, restarted the machine again, and cannot find any indication what changed. During these 'cache' memory drops, my iNode usage drops at the same time. Does anyone have any idea what might be causing this behavior? Clearly my RAM isn't full, so I am curious why this could be happening.

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• ssh-add insists on passphrase

  - by Sam Walton

  I have a new ssh key problem. I have successfully used them for years with Heroku, Git and other servers so I can login without having to issue a passphrase. A few weeks ago, I was unable to push a git repository on my machine to my Heroku and it responded with Permission denied (publickey). Hmm. Everything else but this Heroku function still works. So I ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "newHeroku" with no passphrase (hit return so it would be empty). So I enter: sudo chmod 600 ~/.ssh/newHeroku* Then: ssh-add ~/.ssh/newHeroku.pub Returning return for the passphrase asked it exits without error. The next step is to: ssh-add /Users/sam/.ssh/newHeroku.pub To verify that it's "live" I enter: ssh-add -l To which the output is still The agent has no identities. Okay, to eliminate variables, I repeat the key generation process but entering in a passphrase for a new key. I ssh-add the new key and get the "Enter passphrase" as expected. Now this is why I'm posting here and not on a Heroku blog because ssh-add fails because the passphrase I used keeps getting rejected. It appears, even though I have no problem with my keys elsewhere, that something is wrong with passphrase because even though I get no errors, I get errors when on the one that expects a passphrase. One question, should I expect the Passphrase request for ssh-add when I have not generated a passphrase? It's been suggested that this is a clue and I offer it. Or maybe I have a poor understanding of what ssh-add is doing. Wouldn't be the first time I asked a stupid Q. Also, I'm on Lion and have updated no system updates in the few weeks of this period except application updates.

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• Find slow network nodes between two data centers

  - by 2called-chaos

  I've got a problem with syncing big amount of data between two data centers. Both machines have got a gigabit connection and are not fully occupied but the fastest that I am able to get is something between 6 and 10 Mbit = not acceptable! Yesterday I made some traceroute which indicates huge load on a LEVEL3 router but the problem exists for weeks now and the high response time is gone (20ms instead of 300ms). How can I trace this to find the actual slow node? Thought about a traceroute with bigger packages but will this work? In addition this problem might not be related to one of our servers as there are much higher transmission rates to other servers or clients. Actually office = server is faster than server <= server! Any idea is appreciated ;) Update We actually use rsync over ssh to copy the files. As encryption tends to have more bottlenecks I tried a HTTP request but unfortunately it is just as slow. We have a SLA with one of the data centers. They said they already tried to change the routing because they say this is related to a cheap network where the traffic gets routed through. It is true that it will route through a "cheapnet" but only the other way around. Our direction goes through LEVEL3 and the other way goes through lambdanet (which they said is not a good network). If I got it right (I'm a network intermediate) they simulated a longer path to force routing through LEVEL3 and they announce LEVEL3 in the AS path. I basically want to know if they're right or they're just trying to abdicate their responsibility. The thing is that the problem exists in both directions (while different routes), so I think it is in the responsibility of our hoster. And honestly, I don't believe that there is a DC2DC connection which only can handle 600kb/s - 1,5 MB/s for weeks! The question is how to detect WHERE this bottleneck is

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• Slow upload, fast download on Windows 7 64bit system

  - by Malik

  I've got a weird problem in the download speeds on my desktop PC (Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit) are consistently fast (approx. 400kB/s) but uploads are very slow (around 6-10kB/s). This has been going on for the last 3 weeks or so. I am a very competent user and troubleshooter, and have searched online for 2 weeks for a solution, to no avail. Part of the problem is that internet is provided by WiFi by my landlord and I have no access to the router (BT Home Hub router) although I know for sure he wouldn't have the first idea on how to restrict my usage :) (rules that out) Anyway, I've tried: - various drivers (my Wifi 'card' is TP-link TL-WN851N, and I've tried TP-link + Atheros + Qualcomm Atheross drivers, suggested by Microsoft) - various tweaks to network parameters (e.g. as suggested by SpeedOptimser) - various tweaks to Windows 7 services (e.g. disabling/manual-ing unecessary services) - raising and lowering head onto a reasonably firm surface at moderate frequency (jk :D) None of the above have helped, and I'm officialy asking for help now!! Thanks for your time and effort in advance!

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• 750Gig Hard Drive shows full with only 315Gigs used

  - by Chris Kelly

  I have a Win7 laptop with a 750Gig C: drive. It came partitioned with 714Gig usable from manufacturer. I installed programs, music files, etc up to 285 gigs. As of a few weeks ago it showed 285 Gigs. Two weeks of house guests later and it shows HD is full. I deleted some files but it still shows 652 Gigs on this drive while there are only 285 Gigs on drive. Relevant details: I am Administrator on laptop and have fair knowledge of what I am doing. I did not restore from backup, restore from mirror, upgrade HD's or anything else that would have touched the partition structure. Just daily use as imaging machine and web. I have checked partitions under disk administrator - no change, still partitioned with 714Gigs usable. Have looked through computer C drive by hand showing Hidden files and folders - no change. I have used JDisk Report to double check - it shows I have only 285 Gigs on C drive. I triple checked with TreeSize run as Administrator and it also shows 285 Gigs on C drive - yet Windows 7 still shows almost full. I used Windows 7 Utilities to Check for Disk Errors, and Defragged the drive. No errors shown and no change after Defrag.

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• MySQL fault linked to windows shutdown failure?

  - by Roy

  As far as i understand my computer is experiencing a strange coincidence (hopefully it isn't and somebody can enlighten me). Basically i shut down my laptop (Windows 7) (at 17.20, today, to be precise) successfully (and so also did XAMPP and its included components). However upon starting my laptop up again in the last hour i noticed that the MySQL module service in my xampp control panel was not coming on (just a big red tick; incidentally everything else was working fine). Now, i had the exact same problem about two weeks ago, whereby i just reinstalled xampp and got it working again. But rather than doing this straight away i thought i would just restart my laptop first. However it won't restart (or shut down first) to be precise now. I can remember Windows wasn't shutting down properly the last time it happened (about two weeks ago). Just wondered if this coincidence pointed to any specific diagnostic as regards the problem with MYSQL? If so i would appreciate greatly any help. Otherwise sorry for wasting your time.

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• Diff bios - corrupt video driver

  - by sfonck

  Hi, I'm using an Dell M90 Precision Laptop which has a NVidia Quadro FX 2500M graphics card and is running Windows XP. Laptop has been running fine - but a few weeks ago screen went 'white' - restarted computer- bios and startup screens show weird green dots and stripes, normal startup only shows a black screen... only VGA mode works to display something. I've been trying to remove and reinstall the correct drivers downloaded from Dell's website - no solution. I gave up and reinstalled XP - everything was working perfect again. 2 weeks later - again the white screen - tried everything again (flashin new bios also - nothing works) Reinstalled XP - everyhting was working again, so I made a DriveSnapShot of the partition. Today - again the 'white screen'. Ok, no problem ...I was thinking all I needed to do was to restore the DriveSnapShot backup... Few minutes later the backup is restored ... but guess what: video driver does not work correctly... As the DriveSnapShot restored the complete partition, as it was at the time everything was working perfectly, this would mean my driver problems are due to 'settings' in the bios or on the graphics-card itself + these 'settings' can get overridden by doing a new XP-install.... I'm out of options, can somebody help me to find a solution for this problem: Is there some way to backup and restore a bios after seeing some problems? Is there some way to know what is causing this problem like a bios diff utility? Thanks!

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• Using Plesk for webhosting on Ubuntu - Security risk or reasonably safe?

  - by user66952

  Sorry for this newb-question I'm pretty clueless about Plesk, only have limited debian (without Plesk) experience. If the question is too dumb just telling me how to ask a smarter one or what kind of info I should read first to improve the question would be appreciated as well. I want to offer a program for download on my website hosted on an Ubuntu 8.04.4 VPS using Plesk 9.3.0 for web-hosting. I have limited the ssh-access to the server via key only. When setting up the webhosting with Plesk it created an FTP-login & user is that a potential security risk that could bypass the key-only access? I think Plesk itself (even without the ftp-user-account) through it's web-interface could be a risk is that correct or are my concerns exaggerated? Would you say this solution makes a difference if I'm just using it for the next two weeks and then change servers to a system where I know more about security. 3.In other words is one less likely to get hacked within the first two weeks of having a new site up and running than in week 14&15? (due to occurring in less search results in the beginning perhaps, or for whatever reason... )

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• Computer makes odd noise. Replace almost every component. Computer still makes odd noise.

  - by ShimmerGeek

  My PC was getting pretty old, 5 years or so, and over the course of it's life I replaced the graphics card, HDD and a couple of sticks of RAM; but the PSU, processor, motherboard, fans etc. were all original. A few weeks ago, I started hearing an odd noise. I struggle to describe it, it sounded sortof like the 'click of death' you hear when a HDD may fail, but not quite... (And it was far less irregular) Also, I was sure I heard it once or twice a minute or two after I shut down the PC. This was going on very irregularly for a couple weeks. Some days I would hear no noise at all, others I would hear it often, maybe once every 30 seconds or so. I could find no common denominator - i.e. it did not happen more during gaming or any other intensive use. Anyway, I need my PC to sit some classes over the summer, so I put it in for them to run a HDD stress test and to replace a bunch of the components. I ended up replacing almost everything - the only elements I still have are my blu-ray drive and graphics card. They said when they started to run the HDD stress test it failed instantly (They started the test and it immediately said 'Test Complete' so they assumed it was at fault, and put a new HDD in since I was still under warranty with them.) I took it home a few hours ago, and I am still hearing the noise!!! Do you guys have any theories? I'm getting a little worried, I can't afford for my PC to suddenly fail during the next month - I have a lot of coursework to do. Any thoughts? Is it possible it could be the fan on the graphics card? I'm confused because it's so irregular. Any help would be much appreciated.

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• Sporadic disk clicking sound

  - by Abdó

  Hi, I'm having some unusual and sporadic hard disk clicking issues. Here is a cronological description of the facts. I'm using an ASUS P6T-SE with Intel Core i7, 6Gb RAM 600W Power supply and ATI4670 graphics, running Ubuntu 10.10. About one month ago my hard disk (SATA II Seagate Barracuda 1Tb 7200 rpm) started making a clicking sound: a sort of loud tic-tac, every second or so, when involved in disk activity. The system was clearly slower than before at disk access, but it was functional and I could not find any signal of trouble on the linux logs. I disconnected the disk and tried an older SATA drive I had around: no problem with it. Then I reconnected the Seagate disk, and the problem was mysteriously gone. Ubuntu booted normally, usual speed, no clicking. A couple of weeks later, the problem reappeared. I tried disconnecting reconnecting (as it somehow solved the problem before) without luck. So, despite it was a rather new drive, I assumed it was a hardware issue, made backups and bought a new drive. The new drive is a SATA II Seagate Barracuda 1.5 Tb 7200 rpm. I installed both drives at the same time, with the intention of transferring my files from on to the other. To my surprise, when I booted the computer with both drives, both started making the clicking sound !! Even worse, I removed the old drive, leaving the unformated new drive connected, and booted from a LiveCD. It kept clicking ! Puzzled by this, I tried both drives on my laptop with a SATA to USB cable. At the moment I connected any of them, they made one or two unusual clicks and immediately stopped doing that and worked normally. The old drive I thought almost dead, was working like a charm as if nothing happened. Then I thought: "ok, it must be the motherboard. Let's try again". So, I reconnected the old drive to the ASUS P6T motherboard (the same cables and SATA port as before), and it worked as if nothing happened ! The problem was gone again. The new 1.5 Tb drive was also working ok: No clicking nor slowdown. So I left the old 1Tb disk connected and kept using the computer daily during 3 weeks, until today it happened again. Now I don't really know what to do or check. I'm not even sure if it is a hardware issue any more ! This is rather annoying as it seems it happens with a period of 2 or 3 weeks and I have no means of forcing it to happen. Does anyone have a clue of what can causes this behaviour or have any suggestions of things I should check when it happens again ? What I did today is checking some SMART parameters Error log: smartctl -l error /dev/sda. No errors Short selftest: smartctl -t short /dev/sda. No errors Disk Health check: smartctl -H /dev/sda. passed And here are the vendor specific parameters (smartctl -A /dev/sda) Which I'm not quite sure how to interpret. === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 10 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 120 099 006 Pre-fail Always - 235962588 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0003 095 095 000 Pre-fail Always - 0 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 020 Old_age Always - 187 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 036 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000f 072 060 030 Pre-fail Always - 16348045 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 096 096 000 Old_age Always - 3590 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0013 100 100 097 Pre-fail Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 020 Old_age Always - 94 183 Runtime_Bad_Block 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 184 End-to-End_Error 0x0032 100 100 099 Old_age Always - 0 187 Reported_Uncorrect 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 188 Command_Timeout 0x0032 100 097 000 Old_age Always - 4295164029 189 High_Fly_Writes 0x003a 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022 070 057 045 Old_age Always - 30 (Lifetime Min/Max 19/31) 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 030 043 000 Old_age Always - 30 (0 18 0 0) 195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered 0x001a 037 026 000 Old_age Always - 235962588 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0012 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0010 100 100 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x003e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 240 Head_Flying_Hours 0x0000 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 73950746906346 241 Total_LBAs_Written 0x0000 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 1832967731 242 Total_LBAs_Read 0x0000 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 3294986902 Any clue to this mystery will be really welcome. Thank you very much !!

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• Cooking with Wessty: HTML 5 and Visual Studio

  - by David Wesst

  The hardest part about using a new technology, such as HTML 5, is getting to what features are available and the syntax. One way to learn how to use new technologies is to adapt your current development to help you use the technology in comfort of your own development environment. For .NET Web Developers, that environment is usually Visual Studio 2010. This technique intends on showing you how to get HTML 5 Intellisense working in your current version of Visual Studio 2008 or 2010, making it easier for you to start using HTML 5 features in your current .NET web development projects. Quick Note According to the Visual Web Developer team at Microsoft, the Visual Studio 2010 SP1 beta has support for both HTML 5 and CSS 3. If you are willing to try out the bleeding edge update from Microsoft, then you won’t need this technique. --- Ingredients Visual Studio 2008 or 2010 Your favourite HTML 5 compliant browser (e.g. Internet Explorer 9) Administrator privileges, or the ability to install Visual Studio Extensions in your development environment. Directions Download the HTML 5 Intellisense for Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 extension from the Visual Studio Extension Gallery. Install it. Open Visual Studio. Open up a web file, such as an HTML or ASPX file. he HTML Source Editing toolbar should have appeared. (Optional) If it did not appear, you can activate it through the main menu by selecting View, then Toolbars, and then select HTML Source Editing if it does not have a checkbox beside it. (NOTE: If there is a checkbox, then the toolbar is enabled) In the HTML Source Editing toolbar, open up the validation schema drop box, and select HTML 5. Et voila! You now have HTML 5 intellisense enabled to help you get started in adding HTML 5 awesomeness to your web sites and web applications. Optional – Setting HTML 5 Validation Options At this point, you may want to select how Visual Studio shows validation errors. You can do that in the Options Menu. To get to the Options Menu… In the main menu select Tools, then Options. In the Options window, select and expand Text Editor, then HTML, followed by selecting Validation. Resources HTML 5 Intellisense for Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 extenstion Visual Studio Extension Gallery Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta This post also appears at http://david.wes.st

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• Most Unprofessional Workplace

  - by TehGrumpyCoder

  I've worked lots of places in lots of roles: Delivery truck driver, Boilermaker, antenna rigger, Professional Musician, Electronic Technician, Electrical Engineer, and for most of my career: Software Turkey. I want to say this large company is the most unprofessional place I've ever worked, but then I think about other jobs such as TTI that stiffed us all for 10 months salary -- or had us work 2-1/2 years at 66% however you want to look at it, or maybe NeoPlanet with a cast from a bad sitcom running the show, I could go on, but I digress (as usual). So maybe this place isn't the *most* unprofessional, but the personnel rank up there. I'm in a small room off a factory. There are 3 managerial offices, and 36 common-folk of various skill-sets in a variety of single to quad cubicles. No matter where you sit though, because of the layout and location, you've got a hard wall as one wall of your cubicle. Because of that hard wall, everything echoes. I get off the phone, and the guy in the next cubicle makes a comment in response to my phone conversation... I hate that it can be heard and I hate that they do that! These people have no problem yelling from cube to cube to carry on running conversations some of which are actually work-related. There's a lady two cubes away that talks so loud I can clearly hear every phone conversation she has... all work-related but still... Then the one in the next cubicle must have been raised on a farm because there's only one volume setting: LOUD... "HEY MARGE, CAN I GET IN FOR A QUICK APPOINTMENT AFTER WORK TONIGHT?" ... sigh Also that cube is the 'party cube' so that's where all the candy, cake, donuts, and leftovers sits. Anything MzLoud brings in has to have a verbal recipe associated with it at least 10 times during the day, and of course at volume. I've had running conversations over the top of my cube from people in the next one on each side. The weird thing is... the boss sits with an open door closer to this whole fiasco than me. So I wear a pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones, and crank up Kenny Burrell, Herb Ellis, Wes Montgomery, or Jimmy Smith to the point I can't hear the racket... what the heck, I already have a hearing loss from playing guitar.

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• Cooking with Wessty: WordPress and HTML 5

  - by David Wesst

  WordPress is easily one, if not the most, popular blogging platforms on the web. With the release of WordPress 3.x, the potential for what you can do with this open source software is limitless. This technique intends to show you how to get your WordPress wielding the power of the future web, that being HTML 5. --- Ingredients WordPress 3.x Your favourite HTML 5 compliant browser (e.g. Internet Explorer 9) Directions Setup WordPress on your server or host. Note: You can setup a WordPress.com account, but you will require an paid add-on to really take advantage of this technique.Login to the administration panel. Login to the administration section of your blog, using your web browser.  On the left side of the page, click the Appearance heading. Then, click on Themes. At the top of the page, select the Install Themes tab. In the search box, type the “toolbox” and click search. In the search results, you should see an theme called Toolbox. Click the Install link in the Toolbox item. A dialog window should appear with a sample picture of what the theme looks like. Click on the Install Now button in the bottom right corner. Et voila! Once the installation is done, you are done and ready to bring your blog into the future of the web. Try previewing your blog in HTML 5 by clicking the preview link.   Now, you are probably thinking “Man…HTML 5 looks like junk”. To that, I respond: “HTML was never why your site looked good in the first place. It was the CSS.” Now you have an un-stylized theme that uses HTML 5 elements throughout your WordPress site. If you want to learn how to apply CSS to your WordPress blog, you should check out the WordPress codex that pretty much covers everything there is to cover about WordPress development. Now, remember how we noted earlier that your free WordPress.com account wouldn’t take advantage of this technique? That is because, as of the time of this writing, you needed to pay a fee to use custom CSS. Remember now, this only gives you the foundation to create your own HTML 5 WordPress site. There are some HTML 5 themes out there that already look good, and were built using this as the foundation and added some CSS 3 to really spice it up. Looking forward to seeing more HTML 5 WordPress sites! Enjoy developing the future of the web. Resources Toolbox Theme JustCSS Theme WordPress Installation Tutorial WordPress Theme Development Tutorial This post also appears at http://david.wes.st

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• SharpDX: best practice for multiple RenderForms?

  - by Rob Jellinghaus

  I have an XNA app, but I really need to add multiple render windows, which XNA doesn't do. I'm looking at SharpDX (both for multi-window support and for DX11 / Metro / many other reasons). I decided to hack up the SharpDX DX11 MultiCubeTexture sample to see if I could make it work. My changes are pretty trivial. The original sample had: [STAThread] private static void Main() { var form = new RenderForm("SharpDX - MiniCubeTexture Direct3D11 Sample"); ... I changed this to: struct RenderFormWithActions { internal readonly RenderForm Form; // should just be Action but it's not in System namespace?! internal readonly Action RenderAction; internal readonly Action DisposeAction; internal RenderFormWithActions(RenderForm form, Action renderAction, Action disposeAction) { Form = form; RenderAction = renderAction; DisposeAction = disposeAction; } } [STAThread] private static void Main() { // hackity hack new Thread(new ThreadStart(() = { RenderFormWithActions form1 = CreateRenderForm(); RenderLoop.Run(form1.Form, () = form1.RenderAction(0)); form1.DisposeAction(0); })).Start(); new Thread(new ThreadStart(() = { RenderFormWithActions form2 = CreateRenderForm(); RenderLoop.Run(form2.Form, () = form2.RenderAction(0)); form2.DisposeAction(0); })).Start(); } private static RenderFormWithActions CreateRenderForm() { var form = new RenderForm("SharpDX - MiniCubeTexture Direct3D11 Sample"); ... Basically, I split out all the Main() code into a separate method which creates a RenderForm and two delegates (a render delegate, and a dispose delegate), and bundles them all together into a struct. I call this method twice, each time from a separate, new thread. Then I just have one RenderLoop on each new thread. I was thinking this wouldn't work because of the [STAThread] declaration -- I thought I would need to create the RenderForm on the main (STA) thread, and run only a single RenderLoop on that thread. Fortunately, it seems I was wrong. This works quite well -- if you drag one of the forms around, it stops rendering while being dragged, but starts again when you drop it; and the other form keeps chugging away. My questions are pretty basic: Is this a reasonable approach, or is there some lurking threading issue that might make trouble? My code simply duplicates all the setup code -- it makes a duplicate SwapChain, Device, Texture2D, vertex buffer, everything. I don't have a problem with this level of duplication -- my app is not intensive enough to suffer resource issues -- but nonetheless, is there a better practice? Is there any good reference for which DirectX structures can safely be shared, and which can't? It appears that RenderLoop.Run calls the render delegate in a tight loop. Is there any standard way to limit the frame rate of RenderLoop.Run, if you don't want a 400FPS app eating 100% of your CPU? Should I just Thread.Sleep(30) in the render delegate? (I asked on the sharpdx.org forums as well, but Alexandre is on vacation for two weeks, and my sister wants me to do a performance with my app at her wedding in three and a half weeks, so I'm mighty incented here! http://robjsoftware.org for details of what I'm building....)

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• Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g is Here!

  - by chung.wu

  We hope that you enjoyed the launch event. If you missed it, you may still watch it via our on demand webcast, which is being produced and will be posted very shortly. 11gR1 is a major release of Oracle Enterprise Manager, and as one would expect from a big release, there are many new capabilities that appeal to a broad set of audience. Before going into the laundry list of new features, let's talk about the key themes for this release to put things in perspective. First, this release is about Business Driven Application Management. The traditional paradigm of component centric systems management simply cannot satisfy the management needs of modern distributed applications, as they do not provide adequate visibility of whether these applications are truly meeting the service level expectations of the business users. Business Driven Application Management helps IT manage applications according to the needs of the business users so that valuable IT resources can be better focused to help deliver better business results. To support Business Driven Application Management, 11gR1 builds on the work that we started in 10g to provide better support for user experience management. This capability helps IT better understand how users use applications and the experience that the applications provide so that IT can take actions to help end users get their work done more effectively. In addition, this release also delivers improved business transaction management capabilities to make it faster and easier to understand and troubleshoot transaction problems that impact end user experience. Second, this release includes strengthened Integrated Application-to-Disk Management. Every component of an application environment, from the application logic to the application server, to database, host machines and storage devices, etc... can affect end user experience. After user experience improvement needs are identified, IT needs tools that can be used do deep dive diagnostics for each of the application environment component, analyze configurations and deploy changes. Enterprise Manager 11gR1 extends coverage of key application environment components to include full support for Oracle Database 11gR2, Exadata V2, and Fusion Middleware 11g. For composite and Java application management, two key pieces of technologies, JVM Diagnostic and Composite Application Monitoring and Modeler, are now fully integrated into Enterprise Manager so there is no need to install and maintain separate tools. In addition, we have delivered the first set of integration between Enterprise Manager Grid Control and Enterprise Manager Ops Center so that hardware level events can be centrally monitored via Grid Control. Finally, this release delivers Integrated Systems Management and Support for customers of Oracle technologies. Traditionally, systems management tools and tech support were separate silos. When problems occur, administrators used internally deployed tools to try to solve the problems themselves. If they couldn't fix the problems, then they would use some sort of support website to get help from the vendor's support staff. Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g integrates problem diagnostic and remediation workflow. Administrators can use Oracle Enterprise Manager's various diagnostic tools to begin the troubleshooting process. They can also use the integrated access to My Oracle Support to look up solutions and download software patches. If further help is needed, administrators can open service requests from right within Oracle Enterprise Manager and track status update. Oracle's support staff, using Enterprise Manager's configuration management capabilities, can collect important configuration information about customer environments in order to expedite problem resolution. This tight integration between Oracle Enterprise Manager and My Oracle Support helps Oracle customers achieve a Superior Ownership Experience for their Oracle products. So there you have it. This is a brief 50,000 feet overview of Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g. We know you are hungry for the details. We are going to write about it in the coming days and weeks. For those of you that absolutely can't wait to find out more, you may download our software to try it out today. In fact, for the first time ever, the initial release of Oracle Enterprise Manager is available for both 32 and 64 bit Linux. Additional O/S ports will arrive in the coming weeks. Please stay tuned on the Oracle Enterprise Manager blog for additional updates.

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• Inside Red Gate - Exercises in Leanness

  - by simonc

  There's a new movement rumbling around Red Gate Towers - the Lean Startup. At its core is the idea that you don't have to be in a company with single-digit employees to be an entrepreneur; you simply have to (being blunt) not know what you should be doing. Specifically, you accept that you don't know everything you need to know in order to create a useful, successful & profitable product. This is something that Red Gate has had problems with in the past; we've created products that weren't aimed at the correct market, or didn't solve the problem the user had (although they solved the problem we thought the users had, or the problem the users thought they had). As a result, these products weren't as successful as they could have been. The ideas at the core of the Lean Startup help to combat this tendency to build large, well-engineered products that solve the wrong problem. You need to actually test your hypotheses about what the users and the market needs, rather than just running a project based on those untested assumptions. Furthermore, these tests need to be done as fast as possible (on the order of a week) so that, if necessary, you can change the direction of the project without wasting effort going down a dead end. Over time, as more tests are done and more hypotheses are confirmed or refuted, the project moves towards something that solves users' actual problems. However, re-aligning the development teams that operate within Red Gate along these lines does itself have some issues; we've got very good at doing large, monolithic releases, with a feature set decided well in advance. Currently it takes about 2 weeks to do install & release testing before a release; this is clearly not practicable for a team doing weekly, or even daily releases. There's also many infrastructure issues to be solved; in our source control, build system, release mechanism, support pages & documentation, licensing system, update system, and download pages. All these need modifications to allow the fast releases necessary for each experiment. Not only do we have to change our infrastructure, we have to change our mindset. Doing daily releases means each release won't get nearly as much testing as 'standard' releases. As a team, we have to be prepared that there will be releases that have bugs and issues with them; not only do we have to be prepared to change direction with every experiment we do, but we have to be ready to fix any bugs that are reported very quickly as well. The SmartAssembly team is spearheading this move towards leanness within the company, using Feature Usage Reporting (FUR). We think this is a cracking feature that will really help developers learn how people use their products, but we need to confirm this hypothesis. So, over the next few weeks, we'll be running a variety of experiments on SmartAssembly to either confirm or refute our hypotheses concerning how people use SmartAssembly and apply FUR to their own products. In the rest of this series, I'll be documenting how the experiments we perform get on, and our experiences with applying the Lean Startup model to a mature product like SmartAssembly. Cross posted from Simple Talk.

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• Inside Red Gate - Exercises in Leanness

  - by Simon Cooper

  There's a new movement rumbling around Red Gate Towers - the Lean Startup. At its core is the idea that you don't have to be in a company with single-digit employees to be an entrepreneur; you simply have to (being blunt) not know what you should be doing. Specifically, you accept that you don't know everything you need to know in order to create a useful, successful & profitable product. This is something that Red Gate has had problems with in the past; we've created products that weren't aimed at the correct market, or didn't solve the problem the user had (although they solved the problem we thought the users had, or the problem the users thought they had). As a result, these products weren't as successful as they could have been. The ideas at the core of the Lean Startup help to combat this tendency to build large, well-engineered products that solve the wrong problem. You need to actually test your hypotheses about what the users and the market needs, rather than just running a project based on those untested assumptions. Furthermore, these tests need to be done as fast as possible (on the order of a week) so that, if necessary, you can change the direction of the project without wasting effort going down a dead end. Over time, as more tests are done and more hypotheses are confirmed or refuted, the project moves towards something that solves users' actual problems. However, re-aligning the development teams that operate within Red Gate along these lines does itself have some issues; we've got very good at doing large, monolithic releases, with a feature set decided well in advance. Currently it takes about 2 weeks to do install & release testing before a release; this is clearly not practicable for a team doing weekly, or even daily releases. There's also many infrastructure issues to be solved; in our source control, build system, release mechanism, support pages & documentation, licensing system, update system, and download pages. All these need modifications to allow the fast releases necessary for each experiment. Not only do we have to change our infrastructure, we have to change our mindset. Doing daily releases means each release won't get nearly as much testing as 'standard' releases. As a team, we have to be prepared that there will be releases that have bugs and issues with them; not only do we have to be prepared to change direction with every experiment we do, but we have to be ready to fix any bugs that are reported very quickly as well. The SmartAssembly team is spearheading this move towards leanness within the company, using Feature Usage Reporting (FUR). We think this is a cracking feature that will really help developers learn how people use their products, but we need to confirm this hypothesis. So, over the next few weeks, we'll be running a variety of experiments on SmartAssembly to either confirm or refute our hypotheses concerning how people use SmartAssembly and apply FUR to their own products. In the rest of this series, I'll be documenting how the experiments we perform get on, and our experiences with applying the Lean Startup model to a mature product like SmartAssembly.

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• PARTNER WEBCAST- ORACLE COMPETENCE - PROGRAM (COMPETENCE VIRTUAL)

  - by mseika

  I am pleased to invite you to join the second (Competence Virtual). In Competence - program we will present Oracle Applications' Product's new functions and features including sales positioning. The key objectives of these webcasts are to inspire System Integrator's implementation personnel to conduct successful after sales in their Customer projects. Competencewill be presented on 1st Monday of each quarter after the billable day (4:00 to 5:00 PM CET). The webcast is intended for System Integrator's Implementation Certified Specialists but Competence is open for other interested Oracle Applications system Integrator's personnel as well. At first, two Oracle representatives will discuss Oracle's contribution to Partners. Then you will see product breakout session followed by Q&A with Oracle Experts. Each session will last for maximum 1 hour. A Q&A Document covering all questions and answers will be made available two weeks after the webcast. What are the Benefits for Partners? Find out how Competence helps you to improve your after sales Discover new functions and features so you can enrich your Customer’s solution Learn more about Oracle Applications products, especially sales positioning Hear crucial questions raised by colleagues alike, learn from their interest Engage and present your questions to subject experts Be inspired of the richness of Oracle Applications portfolio – for your and your Customer’s benefit.   Note: Should you already be familiar with a specific Product, then choose another one. Doing so you would expand your knowledge of the overall Applications portfolio. Some presentations contain product demonstration, although these presentations are not intended to be extremely detailed technical presentations. Product breakout sessions:- Fusion CRM: Effective, Efficient and Easy- Fusion HCM: Talent management overview performance, goals, talent review- Distributed Order Management - Fusion SCM Solution- Oracle Transportation Management- Oracle Value Chain Planning: Demantra Sales & Operation Planning and Demantra Demand Management- Oracle CX (Customer Experience) - formerly CEM: Powering Great Customer Experiences- EPM 11.1.2.2 Overview- Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management, 11.1.2.1 For more details please visit and other breakout sessions on OPN page. Delivery FormatCompetence- program (Competence Virtual) is a series of FREE prerecorded Applications product presentations followed by Q&A. It will be delivered over the Web. Participants have the opportunity to submit questions during the cast via chat and subject matter experts will provide verbal answers live. Competence consists of several parallel prerecorded product breakout sessions, each lasting for max. 1 hour. At first, two Oracle representatives will discuss Oracle’s contribution to Partners. Then you’ll see the product breakout sessions followed by Q&A with Oracle Experts. A Q&A document covering all questions and answers will be made available two weeks after the webcast. You can also see Competence afterwards as its content will be available online for the next 6-12 months.The next Competence web casts will be presented as follows: June the 4th  2012 September the 3rd  2012 December the 3rd  2012 March the 4th  2013. Note: Depending on local network bandwidth please allow some seconds time the presentations to download. You might want to refresh your screen by pressing F5. DurationMaximum 1 hour For further information please contact me at [email protected]. Best regards Markku RouhiainenDirector, Applications Partner EnablementWestern Europe

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• PARTNER WEBCAST- ORACLE COMPETENCE - PROGRAM (COMPETENCE VIRTUAL)

  - by mseika

  I am pleased to invite you to join the second (Competence Virtual). In Competence - program we will present Oracle Applications' Product's new functions and features including sales positioning. The key objectives of these webcasts are to inspire System Integrator's implementation personnel to conduct successful after sales in their Customer projects. Competencewill be presented on 1st Monday of each quarter after the billable day (4:00 to 5:00 PM CET). The webcast is intended for System Integrator's Implementation Certified Specialists but Competence is open for other interested Oracle Applications system Integrator's personnel as well. At first, two Oracle representatives will discuss Oracle's contribution to Partners. Then you will see product breakout session followed by Q&A with Oracle Experts. Each session will last for maximum 1 hour. A Q&A Document covering all questions and answers will be made available two weeks after the webcast. What are the Benefits for Partners? Find out how Competence helps you to improve your after sales Discover new functions and features so you can enrich your Customer’s solution Learn more about Oracle Applications products, especially sales positioning Hear crucial questions raised by colleagues alike, learn from their interest Engage and present your questions to subject experts Be inspired of the richness of Oracle Applications portfolio – for your and your Customer’s benefit.   Note: Should you already be familiar with a specific Product, then choose another one. Doing so you would expand your knowledge of the overall Applications portfolio. Some presentations contain product demonstration, although these presentations are not intended to be extremely detailed technical presentations.   Product breakout sessions:- Fusion CRM: Effective, Efficient and Easy- Fusion HCM: Talent management overview performance, goals, talent review- Distributed Order Management - Fusion SCM Solution- Oracle Transportation Management- Oracle Value Chain Planning: Demantra Sales & Operation Planning and Demantra Demand Management- Oracle CX (Customer Experience) - formerly CEM: Powering Great Customer Experiences- EPM 11.1.2.2 Overview- Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management, 11.1.2.1 For more details please visit and other breakout sessions on OPN page. Delivery FormatCompetence- program (Competence Virtual) is a series of FREE prerecorded Applications product presentations followed by Q&A. It will be delivered over the Web. Participants have the opportunity to submit questions during the cast via chat and subject matter experts will provide verbal answers live. Competence consists of several parallel prerecorded product breakout sessions, each lasting for max. 1 hour. At first, two Oracle representatives will discuss Oracle’s contribution to Partners. Then you’ll see the product breakout sessions followed by Q&A with Oracle Experts. A Q&A document covering all questions and answers will be made available two weeks after the webcast. You can also see Competence afterwards as its content will be available online for the next 6-12 months.The next Competence web casts will be presented as follows: June the 4th  2012 September the 3rd  2012 December the 3rd  2012 March the 4th  2013. Note: Depending on local network bandwidth please allow some seconds time the presentations to download. You might want to refresh your screen by pressing F5. DurationMaximum 1 hour For further information please contact me at [email protected]. Best regards Markku RouhiainenDirector, Applications Partner EnablementWestern Europe

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• PARTNER WEBCAST- ORACLE COMPETENCE - PROGRAM (COMPETENCE VIRTUAL)

  - by mseika

  I am pleased to invite you to join the second (Competence Virtual). In Competence - program we will present Oracle Applications' Product's new functions and features including sales positioning. The key objectives of these webcasts are to inspire System Integrator's implementation personnel to conduct successful after sales in their Customer projects. Competencewill be presented on 1st Monday of each quarter after the billable day (4:00 to 5:00 PM CET). The webcast is intended for System Integrator's Implementation Certified Specialists but Competence is open for other interested Oracle Applications system Integrator's personnel as well. At first, two Oracle representatives will discuss Oracle's contribution to Partners. Then you will see product breakout session followed by Q&A with Oracle Experts. Each session will last for maximum 1 hour. A Q&A Document covering all questions and answers will be made available two weeks after the webcast. What are the Benefits for Partners? Find out how Competence helps you to improve your after sales Discover new functions and features so you can enrich your Customer’s solution Learn more about Oracle Applications products, especially sales positioning Hear crucial questions raised by colleagues alike, learn from their interest Engage and present your questions to subject experts Be inspired of the richness of Oracle Applications portfolio – for your and your Customer’s benefit.   Note: Should you already be familiar with a specific Product, then choose another one. Doing so you would expand your knowledge of the overall Applications portfolio. Some presentations contain product demonstration, although these presentations are not intended to be extremely detailed technical presentations.   Product breakout sessions:- Fusion CRM: Effective, Efficient and Easy- Fusion HCM: Talent management overview performance, goals, talent review- Distributed Order Management - Fusion SCM Solution- Oracle Transportation Management- Oracle Value Chain Planning: Demantra Sales & Operation Planning and Demantra Demand Management- Oracle CX (Customer Experience) - formerly CEM: Powering Great Customer Experiences- EPM 11.1.2.2 Overview- Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management, 11.1.2.1 For more details please visit and other breakout sessions on OPN page. Delivery FormatCompetence- program (Competence Virtual) is a series of FREE prerecorded Applications product presentations followed by Q&A. It will be delivered over the Web. Participants have the opportunity to submit questions during the cast via chat and subject matter experts will provide verbal answers live. Competence consists of several parallel prerecorded product breakout sessions, each lasting for max. 1 hour. At first, two Oracle representatives will discuss Oracle’s contribution to Partners. Then you’ll see the product breakout sessions followed by Q&A with Oracle Experts. A Q&A document covering all questions and answers will be made available two weeks after the webcast. You can also see Competence afterwards as its content will be available online for the next 6-12 months.The next Competence web casts will be presented as follows: June the 4th  2012 September the 3rd  2012 December the 3rd  2012 March the 4th  2013. Note: Depending on local network bandwidth please allow some seconds time the presentations to download. You might want to refresh your screen by pressing F5. DurationMaximum 1 hour For further information please contact me at [email protected]. Best regards Markku RouhiainenDirector, Applications Partner EnablementWestern Europe

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• PARTNER WEBCAST- ORACLE COMPETENCE - PROGRAM (COMPETENCE VIRTUAL)

  - by mseika

  I am pleased to invite you to join the second (Competence Virtual). In Competence - program we will present Oracle Applications' Product's new functions and features including sales positioning. The key objectives of these webcasts are to inspire System Integrator's implementation personnel to conduct successful after sales in their Customer projects. Competencewill be presented on 1st Monday of each quarter after the billable day (4:00 to 5:00 PM CET). The webcast is intended for System Integrator's Implementation Certified Specialists but Competence is open for other interested Oracle Applications system Integrator's personnel as well. At first, two Oracle representatives will discuss Oracle's contribution to Partners. Then you will see product breakout session followed by Q&A with Oracle Experts. Each session will last for maximum 1 hour. A Q&A Document covering all questions and answers will be made available two weeks after the webcast. What are the Benefits for Partners? Find out how Competence helps you to improve your after sales Discover new functions and features so you can enrich your Customer’s solution Learn more about Oracle Applications products, especially sales positioning Hear crucial questions raised by colleagues alike, learn from their interest Engage and present your questions to subject experts Be inspired of the richness of Oracle Applications portfolio – for your and your Customer’s benefit.   Note: Should you already be familiar with a specific Product, then choose another one. Doing so you would expand your knowledge of the overall Applications portfolio. Some presentations contain product demonstration, although these presentations are not intended to be extremely detailed technical presentations. Product breakout sessions:- Fusion CRM: Effective, Efficient and Easy- Fusion HCM: Talent management overview performance, goals, talent review- Distributed Order Management - Fusion SCM Solution- Oracle Transportation Management- Oracle Value Chain Planning: Demantra Sales & Operation Planning and Demantra Demand Management- Oracle CX (Customer Experience) - formerly CEM: Powering Great Customer Experiences- EPM 11.1.2.2 Overview- Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management, 11.1.2.1 For more details please visit and other breakout sessions on OPN page. Delivery FormatCompetence- program (Competence Virtual) is a series of FREE prerecorded Applications product presentations followed by Q&A. It will be delivered over the Web. Participants have the opportunity to submit questions during the cast via chat and subject matter experts will provide verbal answers live. Competence consists of several parallel prerecorded product breakout sessions, each lasting for max. 1 hour. At first, two Oracle representatives will discuss Oracle’s contribution to Partners. Then you’ll see the product breakout sessions followed by Q&A with Oracle Experts. A Q&A document covering all questions and answers will be made available two weeks after the webcast. You can also see Competence afterwards as its content will be available online for the next 6-12 months.The next Competence web casts will be presented as follows: June the 4th  2012 September the 3rd  2012 December the 3rd  2012 March the 4th  2013. Note: Depending on local network bandwidth please allow some seconds time the presentations to download. You might want to refresh your screen by pressing F5. DurationMaximum 1 hour For further information please contact me at [email protected]. Best regards Markku RouhiainenDirector, Applications Partner EnablementWestern Europe

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• Oracle WebCenter: Extending Oracle Applications & Oracle Fusion Applications

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} -- Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";}We’ve talked in previous weeks about the key goals of the new release of WebCenter are providing a Modern User Experience, unparalleled Application Integration, converging all the best of the existing portal platforms into WebCenter and delivering a Common User Experience Architecture.  We’ve provided an overview of Oracle WebCenter and discussed some of the other key goals in previous weeks, and this week, we’ll focus on how the new release of Oracle WebCenter extends Oracle Applications and Fusion Applications.When we talk about the new release of Oracle WebCenter, we really emphasize to customers that they can leverage their existing investments and benefit from WebCenter’s Complete, Open and Integrated platform. To summarize what we mean here, Oracle WebCenter is:COMPLETEComprehensive platform for Portals/Websites, Composite Applications with integrated Social/Collaboration services and Content Management infrastructureOPENStandards support improves reuse of existing resources and extends the value of existing systemsINTEGRATEDImplicit integration with Oracle Applications, Oracle Fusion Applications & other enterprise applicationsWith all the existing enterprise applications in Oracle’s application portfolio, in the new release of WebCenter we’ve got a set of pre-built catalogs that customers can use directly to get at all the portlet resources certified and available from Oracle.  It provides customers with a ready-to-use view of their application resources.  And since WebCenter provides seamless support for building these portlets/components in a professional IDE like JDeveloper or from within a Browser, developers and business analysts can quickly assemble the information they require for their existing application investment.  In addition, we’ve taken all the user flows and patterns that we’ve learned in building Fusion Applications and focused on making it dramatically easier to use tools to create reusable application UI components. In this way, one team in the organization using an application can share their components with other teams.  And more importantly, the new team can make changes to the component without breaking the original component.  When tied to enterprise applications, this capability is extremely powerful.  This is what Oracle means when they talk about Enterprise Mashups.  And finally, we’ve provided an innovative way to go well beyond traditional “on the glass” integration by enabling business transactions for the existing applications direct integration using activity streams. This delivers aggregated and “on time” delivery of information to the business users based on what‘s happening in the enterprise that is relevant to their particular job function.  Most importantly, it ties into the personalization interactions discussed earlier so that it can help target information to you directly based on past interactions.  Application integration is key to making businesses function more efficiently with these new Enterprise 2.0 technologies.Keep checking back this week as we share more information on how WebCenter is the most complete, open and integrated modern user experience platform and show key ways WebCenter can extend Oracle Applications & Oracle Fusion Applications.

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• T-SQL Tuesday #005 : SSRS Parameters and MDX Data Sets

  - by blakmk

  Well it this weeks  T-SQL Tuesday #005  topic seems quite fitting. Having spent the past few weeks creating reports and dashboards in SSRS and SSAS 2008, I was frustrated by how difficult it is to use custom datasets to generate parameter drill downs. It also seems Reporting Services can be quite unforgiving when it comes to renaming things like datasets, so I want to share a couple of techniques that I found useful. One of the things I regularly do is to add parameters to the querys. However doing this causes Reporting Services to generate a hidden dataset and parameter name for you. One of the things I like to do is tweak these hidden datasets removing the ‘ALL’ level which is a tip I picked up from Devin Knight in his blog: There are some rules i’ve developed for myself since working with SSRS and MDX, they may not be the best or only way but they work for me. Rule 1 – Never trust the automatically generated hidden datasets Or even ANY, automatically generated MDX queries for that matter.... I’ve previously blogged about this here.   If you examine the MDX generated in the hidden dataset you will see that it generates the MDX in the context of the originiating query by building a subcube, this mean it may NOT be appropriate to use this in a subsequent query which has a different context. Make sure you always understand what is going on. Often when i’m developing a dashboard or a report there are several parameter oriented datasets that I like to manually create. It can be that I have different datasets using the same dimension but in a different context. One example of this, is that I often use a dataset for last month and a dataset for the last 6 months. Both use the same date hierarchy. However Reporting Services seems not to be too smart when it comes to generating unique datasets when working with and renaming parameters and datasets. Very often I have come across this error when it comes to refactoring parameter names and default datasets. "an item with the same key has already been added" The only way I’ve found to reliably avoid this is to obey to rule 2. Rule 2 – Follow this sequence when it comes to working with Parameters and DataSets: 1.    Create Lookup and Default Datasets in advance 2.    Create parameters (set the datasets for available and default values) 3.    Go into query and tick parameter check box 4.    On dataset properties screen, select the parameter defined earlier from the parameter value defined earlier. Rule 3 – Dont tear your hair out when you have just renamed objects and your report doesn’t build Just use XML notepad on the original report file. I found I gained a good understanding of the structure of the underlying XML document just by using XML notepad. From this you can do a search and find references of the missing object. You can also just do a wholesale search and replace (after taking a backup copy of course ;-) So I hope the above help to save the sanity of anyone who regularly works with SSRS and MDX.   @Blakmk

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• TechEd Israel 2010 may only accept speakers from sponsors

  - by RoyOsherove

  A month or so ago, Microsoft Israel started sending out emails to its partners and registered event users to “Save the date!” – Micraoft Teched Israel is coming, and it’s going to be this november! “Great news” I thought to myself. I’d been to a couple of the MS teched events, as a speaker and as an attendee, and it was lovely and professionally done. Israel is an amazing place for technology and development and TechEd hosted some big names in the world of MS software. A couple of weeks ago, I was shocked to hear from a couple of people that Microsoft Israel plans to only accept non-MS teched speakers, only from sponsors of the event. That means that according to the amount that you have paid, you get to insert one or more of your own selected speakers as part of teched. I’ve spent the past couple of weeks trying to gather more evidence of this, and have gotten some input from within MS about this information. It looks like that is indeed the case, though no MS rep. was prepared to answer any email I had publicly. If they approach me now I’d be happy to print their response. What does this mean? If this is true, it means that Microsoft Israel is making a grave mistake – They are diluting the quality of the speakers for pure money factors. That means, that as a teched attendee, who paid good money, you might be sitting down to watch nothing more that a bunch of infomercials, or sub-standard speakers – since speakers are no longer selected on quality or interest in their topic. They are turning the conference from a learning event to a commercial driven event They are closing off the stage to the community of speakers who may not be associated with any organization  willing to be a sponsor They are losing speakers (such as myself) who will not want to be part of such an event. (yes – even if my company ends up sponsoring the event, I will not take part in it, Sorry Eli!) They are saying “F&$K you” to the community of MVPs who should be the people to be approached first about technical talks (my guess is many MVPs wouldn’t want to talk at an event driven that way anyway ) I do hope this ends up not being true, but it looks like it is. MS Israel had already done such a thing with the Developer Days event previouly held in Israel – only sponsors were allowed to insert speakers into the event. If this turns out to be true I would urge the MS community in Israel to NOT TAKE PART AT THIS EVENT in any form (attendee, speaker, sponsor or otherwise). by taking part, you will be telling MS Israel it’s OK to piss all over the community that they are quietly suffocating anyway. The MVP case MS Israel has managed to screw the MVP program as well. MS MVPs (I’m one) have had a tough time here in Israel the past couple of years. ever since yosi taguri left the blue badge ranks, there was not real community leader left. Whoever runs things right now has their eyes and minds set elsewhere, with the software MVP community far from mind and heart. No special MVP events (except a couple of small ones this year). No real MVP leadership happens here, with the MVP MEA lead (Ruari) being on a remote line, is not really what’s needed. “MVP? What’s that?” I’m sure many MS Israel employees would say. Exactly my point. Last word I’ve been disappointed by the MS machine for a while now, but their slowness to realize what real community means in the past couple of years really turns me off. Maybe it’s time to move on. Maybe I shouldn’t be chasing people at MS Israel begging for a room to host the Agile Israel user group. Maybe it’s time to say a big bye bye and start looking at a life a bit more disconnected.

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• Python Coding standards vs. productivity

  - by Shroatmeister

  I work for a large humanitarian organisation, on a project building software that could help save lives in emergencies by speeding up the distribution of food. Many NGOs desperately need our software and we are weeks behind schedule. One thing that worries me in this project is what I think is an excessive focus on coding standards. We write in python/django and use a version of PEP0008, with various modifications e.g. line lengths can go up to 160 chars and all lines should go that long if possible, no blank lines between imports, line wrapping rules that apply only to certain kinds of classes, lots of templates that we must use, even if they aren't the best way to solve a problem etc. etc. One core dev spent a week rewriting a major part of the system to meet the then new coding standards, throwing away several suites of tests in the process, as the rewrite meant they were 'invalid'. We spent two weeks rewriting all the functionality that was lost, and fixing bugs. He is the lead dev and his word carries weight, so he has convinced the project manager that these standards are necessary. The junior devs do as they are told. I sense that the project manager has a strong feeling of cognitive dissonance about all this but nevertheless agrees with it vehemently as he feels unsure what else to do. Today I got in serious trouble because I had forgotten to put some spaces after commas in a keyword argument. I was literally shouted at by two other devs and the project manager during a Skype call. Personally I think coding standards are important but also think that we are wasting a lot of time obsessing with them, and when I verbalized this it provoked rage. I'm seen as a troublemaker in the team, a team that is looking for scapegoats for its failings. Since the introduction of the coding standards, the team's productivity has measurably plummeted, however this only reinforces the obsession, i.e. the lead dev simply blames our non-adherence to standards for the lack of progress. He believes that we can't read each other's code if we don't adhere to the conventions. This is starting to turn sticky. Now I am trying to modify various scripts, autopep8, pep8ify and PythonTidy to try to match the conventions. We also run pep8 against source code but there are so many implicit amendments to our standard that it's hard to track them all. The lead dev simple picks faults that the pep8 script doesn't pick up and shouts at us in the next stand-up meeting. Every week there are new additions to the coding standards that force us to rewrite existing, working, tested code. Thank heavens we still have tests, (I reverted some commits and fixed a bunch of the ones he removed). All the while there is increasing pressure to meet the deadline. I believe a fundamental issue is that the lead dev and another core dev refuse to trust other developers to do their job. But how to deal with that? We can't do our job because we are too busy rewriting everything. I've never encountered this dynamic in a software engineering team. Am I wrong to question their adherence to coding standards? Has anyone else experienced a similar situation and how have they dealt with it successfully? (I'm not looking for a discussion just actual solutions people have found)

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